My youngest son, Dalton, has been flying model rockets for many years. He has always been with me building and launching larger rockets and has been looking forward to getting officially certified for high-powered rockets.
When Dalton found out in late 2023 that he could get his Level 1 certification when he turned 12, the quest began to get a rocket designed, built, and prepared for certification at the first launch of the year in 2024.
Dalton flew his first rocket on 28 MAY 2016. He certified Level 1 on 4 MAY 2024.
There were many rockets in between. Some were successful, some were not but we learned from each one and had a great time building and flying them.
After all of those years helping and observing, it was time to put it all into practice and build his own rocket from scratch.
The Rocket
I have a fairly large selection of components (body tubing, nose cones, fins, etc.) that I have collected over the years. I let Dalton pick out the components he wanted to use for his rocket. The only real design constraint was that we needed to use parts we had on hand.
The rocket ended up with several parts from a Loc Expediter and the rest from parts "in stock". He fabricated the fins and centreing rings from plywood.
Dalton designed the rocket starting in OpenRocket and transcribed the fins and centring rings to Fusion 360. All the plywood parts were then cut on the laser cutter from svg's exported from Fusion.
Fabrication Highlights
The fins and centring rings were cut from 6mm plywood that I salvaged from a workbench that was left in the house when we bought it. An old school workbench from the 1960's, which I still use the frame for my 'more modern' MFT workbench.
It is very high quality plywood and I thought a fitting use for something special.
Design
The design uses interlocking fin tabs and centring rings to ensure alignment.
The First Launch
The first launch started extremely well. The rocket performed as expected and the motor ejection charge fired close to apogee. The attachment point for the transition broke away and the payload section (with the camera attached) came down slowly and was retrieved by one of the local fliers.
Dalton and I searched for the booster that had drifted under parachute for a significant distance. Unfortunately, it was lost.
The timestamp on the video is incorrect.